Multiband Dub
My parents had gifted me a portable Sony multiband world radio to take with me for my ten-month stay as an exchange student in Texas. It was a cute idea: something that would allow me to tune into German-language shortwave broadcasts if I ever felt homesick. In reality, I never used it for that purpose. But the radio nerd in me was thrilled to have even more frequency bands to explore than on my trusty bedside radio back home. Instead of using it to stay connected with Germany, I mainly used it to dicover exciting new FM stations I could pick up in North Texas.
For the past few years, the music I had listened to was mostly Scandinavian black metal: Emperor, Immortal, Setherial, and the like. Even back home, that taste had marked me as fringe, but in the US it was seen as utterly bizarre, strange European nonsense, even by the "freaks" at my high school. But since I had already left part of my old self behind, I was ready for new music too. Having arrived at black metal through a more mainstream-compatible alternative rock path (Nirvana, The Offspring, etc.) I was open to anything with distorted guitars. The Dallas/Fort Worth stations KDGE, The Edge, and KEGL, The Eagle, quickly became my defaults. I discovered the local grunge-punk band The Toadies, who were huge at the time, and was soon swept up in the summer of 1996 hype surrounding Sublime, whose charismatic singer Brad Nowell had recently died of a heroin overdose just before the breakthrough release of their self-titled album. I would remain a huge Sublime fan for years to come.
Another great discovery was KNON, a non-profit, listener-supported community radio station with the weirdest, most wonderfully lo-fi fringe programming: from religious service broadcasts to nerdy late-night heavy metal shows. Despite my usual preference for distorted guitars, my favorite evening program became a reggae show hosted by a Jamaican DJ, which opened my ears to the cavernous soundscapes of dub music. It was there that I discovered my love for artists like King Tubby, Prince Jammy, and Dub Syndicate.
I soon came to appreciate that my little multiband radio ran on AA batteries and had a headphone jack, which meant I could even take it with me on the school bus and zone out. I was the only junior-year student who had to ride the bus, since my host parents would not allow me to accept rides from classmates. There, I listened to the morning commute rerun of the wildly inappropriate Howard Stern Show, syndicated on KEGL, and loved every minute of it. I still remember the ongoing fad of women being asked to call into the show to compete in "queef-offs", as well as an listener call of some freak who claimed to have collected his semen in a jar under his bed.
American radio seemed far more freewheeling than anything I had known in southern Germany. Pure bliss for a pubescent teenage guy during the peak Beavis & Butthead era.